Jewish Intellectual History: 16th to 20th Century

Topic

Philosophy &

Subtopic

Intellectual History Intellectual History

Jewish Intellectual History:

th

th

16 to 20 Century

Course Guidebook

Professor David B. Ruderman

University of Pennsylvania

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David B. Ruderman, Ph.D.

Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History and Director of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Professor Ruderman was educated at the City College of New York, the Teacher's Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Columbia University. He received his rabbinical degree from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in l97l and his Ph.D. in Jewish history from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in l975. Before joining the faculty at Penn, he held the Frederick P. Rose Chair of Jewish History at Yale University (1983?1994) and the Louis L. Kaplan Chair of Jewish Historical Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park (1974?1983), where he was instrumental in establishing both institutions' Judaic studies programs. At the University of Maryland, he also won the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award in l982?1983.

Professor Ruderman is the author of The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham B. Mordecai Farissol (Hebrew Union College Press), for which he received the JWB National Book Award in Jewish History in l982; Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician (Harvard University Press); and A Valley of Vision: The Heavenly Journey of Abraham Ben Hananiah Yagel (University of Pennsylvania Press; Shazar Institute, Jerusalem). He is co-author, with William W. Hallo and Michael Stanislawski, of the two-volume Heritage: Civilization and the Jews Study Guide and Source Reader (Praeger), prepared in conjunction with the showing of the public television series of the same name. Professor Ruderman has edited Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (New York University Press), Preachers of the Italian Ghetto (University of California Press), and The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians (with David Myers; Yale University Press). His most recent works are Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (Yale University Press; Wayne State University Press) and Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: AngloJewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press). He received the Koret Book Award in Jewish History in 2001 for the latter book.

Professor Ruderman is also the author of numerous articles and reviews. He has served on the board and as vice-president of the Association of Jewish

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Studies and on the boards of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Journal of Reform Judaism, the Renaissance Society of America, and the World Union of Jewish Studies. He also chaired the task force on continuing rabbinic education for the Central Conference of American Rabbis and HUC-JIR (1989?1992) and the Publications Committee of the Yale Judaic Series, published by Yale University Press (1984?1994). He is the current president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, the senior honor society of American professors of Judaic studies. He also has taught in the graduate school of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Hebrew University. Professor Ruderman currently serves as director of the Victor Rothschild Memorial Symposium in Jewish studies, a seminar for doctoral and postdoctoral students held each summer at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, in Jerusalem. The National Foundation for Jewish Culture recently awarded him a lifetime achievement award for his work in Jewish history. He has lectured widely to university audiences, as well as clergy, community, synagogue, and church groups. He was born in New York in 1944 and is married with two grown children.

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Table of Contents Jewish Intellectual History: 16th to the 20th Century

Professor Biography .................................................................................... i

Course Scope ............................................................................................... 1

Lecture One

On Studying Jewish History .............................. 4

Lecture Two

Defining Modern Jewish History and Thought ....................................................... 9

Lecture Three

Cultural Transformation in the Italian Ghetto ......................................... 14

Lecture Four

Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Messianism................................................ 19

Lecture Five

The Challenge of Baruch Spinoza ................... 23

Lecture Six

Moses Mendelssohn and His Generation......... 27

Lecture Seven

The Science of Judaism ................................... 32

Lecture Eight

Heinrich Graetz--Jewish Historian ................. 36

Lecture Nine

Abraham Geiger--The Shaping of Reform Judaism........................................... 40

Lecture Ten

The Neo-Orthodoxy of Samson Raphael Hirsch................................................. 44

Lecture Eleven

Zecharias Frankel and Conservative Judaism................................ 48

Lecture Twelve

Samuel David Luzzatto--Judaism and Atticism ..................................................... 52

Lecture Thirteen

Zionism's Answer to the Jewish Problem........ 56

Lecture Fourteen

Three Zionist Visions....................................... 60

Lecture Fifteen

The Jewish Adventure with Socialism............. 65

Lecture Sixteen

Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason............. 69

Lecture Seventeen

Leo Baeck's Mystery and Commandment ....... 73

Lecture Eighteen

Martin Buber's Religious Existentialism ......... 77

Lecture Nineteen

Jewish Law--Martin Buber versus Franz Rosenzweig................................. 81

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Table of Contents Jewish Intellectual History: 16th to the 20th Century

Lecture Twenty

Mordecai Kaplan and American Judaism ........ 85

Lecture Twenty-One Abraham Heschel--Mystic and Social Activist ........................................... 89

Lecture Twenty-Two Theological Responses to the Nazi Holocaust....................................... 93

Lecture Twenty-Three Feminist Jewish Theology ............................... 97

Lecture Twenty-Four Current Trends in Jewish Thought................. 101

Timeline ................................................................................................... 105

Glossary ................................................................................................... 108

Biographical Notes.................................................................................. 116

Bibliography............................................................................................ 121

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Jewish Intellectual History: 16th to the 20th Century

Scope:

This course explores the problem of Jewish identity in the modern era, roughly in the last three centuries. Like other religious and national groups, Jews confronted manifold challenges in defining the meaning their religious and cultural affiliation could hold in a social and intellectual world radically different from that of the pre-modern age. Secularist and universalistic ideologies threatened to undermine the specific faith and practice that had bound Jews together for centuries. Were the propositions that an all-powerful God existed, that he demanded of his adherents a sanctified body of religious duties, and that he still provided comfort in a world plagued with untold suffering, especially for Jews, still tenable to the majority of Jews? Could Jews still justify the notion of a chosen people, living apart from the rest of humanity, marrying within its own faith community, and even living within the borders of its ancestral homeland in a social climate where Jewish integration and full participation with the rest of humanity had become the norm? And what were Jews expected to do as Jews to express this group loyalty if the traditional notions of divine service had become increasingly tenuous to many who valued more their own human autonomy and "doing their own thing"? Could the dictates of a communal legal code and an insistence on group loyalty and group cohesiveness still command their continued allegiance?

This is a course about Jewish identity but hardly one for Jews alone. Although it looks specifically at the social and cultural world of Jews and their intellectual responses to modernity, it addresses more broadly the challenge of any particular group, grounded in a tradition of religious thought and practice, attempting to make sense of the overwhelming and radical changes in its social, political, economic, and intellectual status in the modern world. Could any traditional ideology survive the onslaught of these new social pressures and intellectual challenges without discarding, modifying, or redefining its very notions of self in relation to "others" and its self-imposed norms of group behavior that had retained their legitimacy for centuries?

This course deals with the Jewish encounter with modernity, but it is not meant to be a survey of modern Jewish history or sociology that focuses primarily on the political, social, or economic contexts of the modern

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Jewish experience. Although it refers to these specific contexts, the continuities and discontinuities of Jewish life in Europe, North America, and the Middle East in the last three centuries, it is primarily concerned with a small group of thinkers living in the modern era, who responded to the changes of their lifetimes by reflecting deeply on the texts and traditions of Judaism and their continuing relevance for modern Jews. In other words, the course deals with the formation of a modern Jewish consciousness on the part of an elite group of intellectuals and, in some cases, communal leaders, who addressed in their writing the challenge of being Jewish in the modern world. As Jewish thinkers had done in previous ages, they grappled with the meaning of God, Torah, and Israel, that is, with personal belief, with the meaning of Jewish ritual acts, and with the purpose of continued Jewish existence. They began from a position of faith and attempted to articulate a sense of the meaning of that faith to other Jews with attenuated loyalty to Jewish tradition. In this manner, the writings of these thinkers are linked directly to the long exegetical traditions of Jewish writers in earlier ages, who had previously attempted to breathe new life and meaning into the sacred texts and utterances of classical Judaism.

After carefully describing the broad setting of modern Jewish life, the course initially looks backward at several radical changes that affected Jewish life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, establishing the context for Benedict Spinoza and his devastating assault on the foundations of both Judaism and Christianity. In some sense, the lectures that follow offer a series of responses to Spinoza's challenge regarding the viability of Judaism in the modern era. Beginning with the German Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, the course then offers a series of case studies of Jewish thinkers who strove to understand the meaning of Judaism for their era. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Enlightenment ideas, political emancipation, nationalism, and socialism, along with new and virulent forms of anti-Semitism, stimulated the construction of new religious and secular ideologies (Reform, Conservatism, Neo-Orthodoxy, Zionism, and Jewish socialism). In the twentieth century, Jewish thinkers again rethought their identities in postmodern categories, which for many, meant a painful engagement with the implications of the Holocaust for the future of human existence and Jewish faith.

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